Bridging Scales and Disciplines to Understand Robust Development

Developing organisms are remarkably robust, with tissues and organs acquiring their precise shapes and function despite genetic variation, inherent noise and stress of morphogenesis, and environmental stressors. While progress has been made in understanding developmental robustness through the lens of genetics, we still don’t know how cells coordinate both space and time to build robust organs with precision. In turn, this limits our ability to engineer robust systems, for example to build self-organising cell collectives or organs in a dish or create smart materials that can self-repair and produce reproducible outcomes. Robustness in development is a multidimensional problem that requires an interdisciplinary approach. However, research on biological robustness often proceeds in parallel, with limited integration between fields and disciplines. To bridge this gap and work towards more holistic models of developmental robustness, it is essential to bring together experts who investigate robustness across various scales, those who strive to build systems that emulate biological robustness, and researchers who integrate both theoretical and experimental approaches.

The Workshop will include the following sessions:

• From cells to tissues: coordination across scales
• From numbers to models: quantitative and theoretical approaches 
• Learning by building: bottom-up approaches 
• Insights from mechanisms of genetic robustness
• Timing is everything: temporal aspects of robustness 
• Staying robust after development: tissue regeneration